This is where yesterday follows tomorrow, departure follows arrival, front follows back, start follows end, past follows future and even life follows death.
What is it?
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1$\begingroup$ A bit of a consistency error helped me out: "This is where" turned to "what is it?" $\endgroup$– ProxyNov 3, 2014 at 18:50
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3 Answers
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A dictionary. The word 'yesterday' comes after 'tomorrow' in a dictionary. The word 'departure' comes after 'arrival' in a dictionary. And so on...
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Only an English-language dictionary, in general.
For bonus points, here are some other languages where this does not hold: denoting "follows" by '>' and "doesn't follow" by '>#' :
French: hier > demain, départ > arrivé, devant ># envers, début ># fin, passé > avenir, vie > mort
German: gestern ># morgen, Abfahrt ># Ankunft, Vorderseite > Rückseite, Anfang ># Ende, Vergangenheit ># Zukunft, Leben ># Tod/Sterben
Hence we could characterize any language with a 6-digit binary number (although the choice of words is in some cases subjective, as in whether 'front' vs 'back' refers to the human body or 'obverse'/'reverse' etc.)
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1$\begingroup$ I tried to, but it only broke them a bit further (and if my edit gets passed, you should reverse it). I think spoiler quotes might be one line only, or there's a bug. $\endgroup$ Nov 4, 2014 at 0:30
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$\begingroup$ Thanks for your help with formatting guys. The short answer is
>!can only be used for spoilers, not for anything else. So in my case I used>#to denote 'does not follow'. $\endgroup$– smciMar 17, 2019 at 0:44
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I would guess a dictionary. All the first words of those pairs are lexicographically after the second words.
